S8000fd First Impressions and Filter News

I got my s8000fd on Tuesday but haven’t had the chance to try it out too much but here are my first impressions.

Operation: The zoom is really fast, the auto focus is really fast. Time to next shot is also quick except when using red eye reduction. There is also a fast auto focus option called High Speed Shooting but I didn’t really notice any difference in focus speeds. The menus are nicely organized and easy to find. The scene modes work very well and so does the face detection.

Image Quality:The image quality is also quite good. At ISOs above 400 the pictures get noisy so I’ve kept the camera at ISO Auto (400) but the noise is not that noticable on my 1280*960 laptop screen upto ISO 800. The Flash is excellent and portraits turn out nice and more professional looking even with the flash and not excessively white like I’m used to. Colors are quite accurate. I tried photographing varios different colored objects and each turned out exactly like they were in real life. I took all the photos in standard color mode and most of them indoors in low light. Am yet to try the chrome (aka more saturation) mode and clicking some outdoor pictures during the day.

Focus: Auto-Focus in macro mode is not that great sometimes in very low light and manual focus is extremely slow and kind of cumbersome to use because you have to keep the +/- button pressed while moving the zoom. it would be nice to just click a button once to switch from zoom to focus. This is a minor issue because in most cases the auto focus is excellent. Super Macro is really super and it can focus very well even in low light with the lens really close to objects!! – only you cannot zoom in or out in Super Macro. The lens is fixed at about 60mm according to the manual.

Image Stabilization: The image stabilization is also really nice. The camera grip is really good and the stabilization is only required at really long zooms. It is easy to turn on and off with a convenient button. This is my first Fuji camera and the button and menu layout is easy to follow and intuitive.

Battery Life: I put in a brand new set of fully charged AA Energizer 2500 mAH batteries in the camera and clicked about 150 pictures and the batteries are still going. So battery life is nice and I zoomed in and out a lot, used the flash often, browsed through pictures on the camera so the batteries stood up to reasonable heavy use.